Thanks to: P.S. Sword (good to have you back here!), Fowl Fox, 6000j (got it right this time haha) and Spencerblue.
WARNINGS: Wolfy attempting to write fairy stuff... Let me know if I need to stick to firefights and car chases haha
CHAPTER TWELVE
"LIFT"
Definition: 1) to pick up 2) to raise something 3) to steal something
Fowl Manor, Dublin
"He's taken a bad turn and they're taking him down for emergency surgery. That's all they said," Xandr told her, his words calm and succinct, despite the turmoil going on behind his eyes.
"He's taken a bad turn? How?" she demanded, leaping up out of bed and beginning to crash around the room for her clothes.
He raised his hands, turning away politely as she flung her pyjamas onto the bed and began to dress. "I told you; that's all they said."
"Honest to God, these useless…"
"Theresa," he said, sternly. "We have to trust the professionals on this one. Now get dressed if you like, but we will not be going up to the hospital unless we hear anything further. Understood?"
"But…"
"No buts. I have spent enough of my life outside theatre doors and I can assure you; your presence there will do nothing but give you bedsores on your arse from the god-awful plastic seats. Now if you can't sleep, I will be downstairs. Come and find me and we'll wait for news together."
"Well of course I won't be able to bloody well sleep!" she said, irritably. But he was gone. The door closing behind him with a soft click and for a moment she had to remind herself that she wasn't the only one that Myles was important to.
Undisclosed Hospital, Dublin – Several Hours Later
"This is by far the stupidest, most dangerous thing you've ever asked me to do."
"Yet here you are," she said, out of the corner of her mouth. "So I'd appreciate it if you stopped with the chatter and got on with it."
"Sorry, what was that, nurse?" the only other conscious man in the lift with them asked.
"Nothing," she said, and jabbed him with a sterile needle straight in the neck.
His gaze had gone blank almost before his knees crumpled and he fell to the floor. Not dead, but unconscious enough that he would not remember the following events that would take place in the elevator in the next few minutes. Which was a shame for him, for they were to be truly remarkable to behold.
"How long have we got on the sedative?"
"Not long enough if you keep jabbering on," she said, unscrewing the lift controls with a miniature screwdriver she had procured from her waistband.
"I would just like to state for the record, this is not one of your better plans."
"Duly noted. Several times," she said, jamming the screwdriver between her teeth and disconnecting some of the internal wires behind the panel.
"Although admittedly probably better than the 'drug him so deeply they take him to the morgue and break him out from there' plan."
"That was also a perfectly workable plan."
"If you say so..."
The elevator shuddered to a stop, all the lights flickering off and leaving nothing but the eerie glow of the emergency beacon above the door, reflected in the mirrors all around them.
"OK. That should buy us a few minutes."
The giant on the bed emitted a low groan.
He was dreaming. He was almost certain of it.
Almost.
His eyes flickered open and it was though he had entered some alternate reality. The air was green and pulsing, the room spinning around him. He closed his eyes again. But not before noticing something vital.
She was back.
He had no way of communicating an acknowledgement of the fact, but she was back by his side; and this time, she wasn't alone.
The person with her was much shorter than her – not entirely unusual, except this male was barely more than half her height and wearing some sort of green jumpsuit. Or maybe it wasn't green. Everything looked green in this light.
"D'Arvit, you certainly can pick 'em," he said in a gruff voice.
Myles blinked blearily at him, trying to reset his focus. The contrast of his vision seemed off too, for the man looked almost magenta in the face against the lime of his overalls. But that, again could have been the green and white emergency lighting messing with his colour perception.
Or the fact that this was another hallucination.
Where were they?
He remembered hitting the floor.
He remembered realising he had been chasing a mirage.
He remembered the pain.
He remembered the nursing staff shouting to eachother, trying valiantly but ineffectively to tell him to lie still.
He remembered Bates shouting to him, suddenly falling quiet as they forcibly sedated the other bodyguard.
Then everything rushed forwards at lightning speed.
Again. The same as the other times.
The lights. The masks. The surgery.
He remembered waking up to panicked voices, forcing him back under – he never had taken well to sedation.
"You are running hot," she said, perhaps finally having some sort of misgivings.
Myles didn't know what that meant, but it didn't matter; it wasn't directed at him.
The short man took off his gloves, but Myles found he couldn't even open his mouth, let alone lift a finger to stop him if he was about to attack.
"Hot enough," he replied. "But I'm no healer, Mo. I can't promise you anything. If your surgeons…"
"I am aware of that. Just…" she sighed – and then came the thing which convinced The Major that he really must be dreaming – smoothing a hand across his head.
His eyelids closed automatically with the movement and he struggled to open them again. He felt a light, warm pressure on his side and just at the edge of his vision he could see it was the palm of the small man that was touching him.
"No," he said, shaking his head. "It's no good; I'm going to need a different entry wound. I can't heal him from one with these disgusting pipe things sticking out of it. You're going to need to pull those out too – Gods, you mudmen are barbaric…"
"Barbaric, he says," she mimicked, sliding a knife seemingly from nowhere. "As he asks me to rip out drains and slice open the boy."
"Some 'boy'," the man grunted.
"He'll always be a 'boy' to me," she said, running a thumb down his sternum. "Will here do?"
"Anywhere away from old wounds – difficult this time, I know. There will do."
Myles wanted to say something to stop her – wanted to ask how the hell she thought sticking another hole in him would do any good – but he could do nothing but watch helplessly as she drew a short, horizontal line in his skin with the steel blade. Blood oozed much more slowly than it should from the fresh wound and he felt a curious sensation that was somewhere between pain and pins and needles.
"You'll have to be quick," she said, wrenching out one of the plastic pipes threaded into his torso – and there was no denying that was pain. "I'll leave some of these. It won't do him any harm to remove them when he wakes up. I'll unplug the heart monitor as soon as you start. Another reason mid-transport was a better option. Less chance of someone hearing it and coming running in here."
"Or the morgue, where it would have been more remote and he would have been chilled, which always helps."
"See? Now you're coming around to my way of thinking."
"I never said..."
"Just get on with it before some good Samaritan with a crowbar decides to start 'rescuing' us," she told him.
"Oh brilliant," said the man sarcastically, jumping up onto the bed. "I love working under pressure of exposing my entire race of People by sticking my fingers in some mudman's chest… This may not even work, you do know that?"
Myles blinked up at him, groggily, certain by now that there was yet again some sort of hallucination interfering with his vision, for the man now appeared to be sporting a pair of pointed ears to go along with his positively crimson face. And aside from that, what he was going on about was beyond his current comprehension, though he doubted it would have made much more sense to even a sharp mind.
"I do," said the woman, crossing over to the machinery in readiness. "And as you keep repeating it I can hardly forget, can I?"
"Alright, alright," growled the pointed-eared gentleman, leaping up onto the bed, throwing one leg over the bodyguard's barrel chest and straddling him.
This is a really, really weird dream, mused the part of Myles not thoroughly alarmed by everything that had happened since he opened his eyes in the elevator.
"Let's get this over with, shall we?" said the stranger. Then he plunged both thumbs into the newest site of bleeding on The Major's chest and filled his ribcage with what felt like a fireworks display. The giant's back arched, almost unseating the creature jockeyed on his torso, his heart going into overdrive in comeback to the apparent attack.
The response was a lessening in the voltage of whatever was being forced into him, but it didn't stop entirely.
"Might need you over here, Mo," the man said through gritted teeth. "Pin his shoulders. I'm not sure his heart will take much more of this."
The woman unplugged the portable heart monitor before it became a constant whine.
"I'll concentrate on keeping him alive, you concentrate on doing the healing," she said, pulling on a pair of gloves to protect her from the strange electricity. She placed one hand on each shoulder pressing him firmly to the mattress, pinning him but simultaneously ready to commence CPR if she was needed. "Do it."
Their patient tried to shake his head. Whatever they were doing was not working. His body tried valiantly to flood his system with enough adrenalin to respond to his almost panicked signals to remove himself from the danger.
"It's your call…" the man muttered, hesitating to renew his efforts once more.
"Just get on with it, Julius!"
Myles made some sort of strangled howl like a wounded beast, before his jaw snapped shut forcibly and his eyes rolled back in his head. But just before they did, just before he returned to the darkness once more, he could have sworn his entire body was surrounded by – permeated in, even – tiny, bright blue sparks…
It was quiet.
Too quiet.
He knew if he listened hard enough he would be able to catch some clue to his surroundings, but his usually focused mind was having a hard time of it, almost as though it was rebooting.
Flashes of disjointed images raced through his cerebral cortex, but every time he tried to focus on them they blazed out of existence until finally, eventually, the peace returned.
He was getting irritatingly used to forgetting what it was he was even trying to remember, but this was even more than that. It wasn't drug induced, he was sure of it. It was like his own brain had filed something away somewhere even he couldn't access it…
Click.
He opened his eyes. Training dictated he should not have done that without first exploring his surroundings with every other sense available to him, but the stench of hospital cleaning fluid had already subconsciously revealed to him that he was still incarcerated in a medical facility and that small sound could have been anything from a gun being cocked to…
The door.
The room was empty, but there was the lingering sense of someone having just left it.
He tried to sit up, automatically bracing himself against the onslaught of pain from the movement when he realised, with a rush of incredulous awareness, that he was not in pain.
Well, in actuality he was still in a degree of discomfort that would render most human beings at least cringing and whimpering, but after the past week or so of utter agony, it was practically pleasurable.
He looked down at his chest, which was a patchwork of white dressings; all bloodied and… was that singed? His mind waived the concept and he was suddenly hit with the urge to tear back the plasters and inspect the damage for himself.
He did so, scratching his short nails under the tape and peeling it up. The adhesive stretched, tackily and he decided that one swift movement would be the most effective method of removal.
He stripped it back quickly, too shocked by what was revealed to notice the sting.
Underneath the dressing, though it had clearly bled through onto the gauze itself, the wound was negligible. A mere, weeping pockmark compared to the bullet-hole it had been. He bit his lip thoughtfully, trying to decipher what this must mean. Hurriedly, he began removing all of the other dressings he could see. The result was the same. Even the drains in his sides had been almost sealed into the skin, the stitches deep within overgrown flesh.
He grasped one of the tubes between his thumb and forefinger and tugged at it. It moved - barely. Determined, he pulled harder, sliding it free with a sickly, sucking sound. He hissed through his teeth as he did so, tensing up until the plastic tube popped free, blood and remnants of whatever the drain had been removing oozing slowly from the resulting wound.
He held it up to the light, twirling it back and forth slowly. One end – the end which had been inside his body – was misshapen, almost as though it had melted…
A different thought struck him so suddenly that that notion vanished into the ether.
Drains should never be left in long enough that the skin sealed around them entirely. Stitches needed removed after ten days, yet these had clearly been left too long. Bullet holes didn't miraculously fix overnight…
How long have I been out?
The thought pulsed through him like a physical shudder.
This was weeks of healing. Months, even.
He felt better.
He felt almost… well.
He threw back the sheet, caution at the forefront of his mind as he suddenly remembered his last attempt to get out of bed.
But this time was different. For one, they had dressed him in pyjama trousers, which was a great improvement on the standard hospital gown, although he would have to find a jacket of some sorts if he was planning on leaving the hospital for the sharp, winter air of the outdoors.
Then again, it might not even be winter anymore.
'Not knowing' bothered him more than he cared to admit, so he lowered himself to the floor, both his shoulders fully functional and strong – a relief as much as it was a bewilderment.
He stood, feeling only slightly unsteady on his feet. And that was more vestibular disturbance of his proprioception than anything sinister.
He'd just get up and see if he could decipher what month it was, he told himself. Not much more.
Nevertheless, he didn't waste any time pulling the canula from his inner elbow.
The window was curtained and he could tell it was dark outside before he even threw them back. Lights twinkled below, reflecting off the frost patterns painted onto parked cars. He touched his forehead to the glass, revelling in the coolness.
It could still very well be March.
He should go check for a calendar or the likes.
Almost smiling at the ease in which he crossed to the other side of the room, he opened the door with measured care and stepped out into the corridor once more, looking around, curiously.
The nurse's desk, the light-up trees... everything was much the same as it had been the last time. Except himself, of course. He was a different man compared to the crippled wreck he had been when he had last attempted such a thing.
Still not quite sure he wasn't just dreaming, he stopped at the door he had unceremoniously fell through previously and tapped softly on it. If the occupant was still a trained bodyguard, he would surely at least notice the noise. If it was no longer Bates, he wouldn't have disturbed them.
There was a rustle on the other side and Myles felt his mouth twitch into a smile.
"Bates," he whispered.
The rustling stopped, then intensified. Within a few seconds, the door was unlatched from the inside and there was William Bates, stood clutching his chest and looking quite surprised to see his trauma-bonded-companion not only upright but also surprisingly healthy.
"Major? What are you doing out of bed?"
"Hello Will," he said, and then; "I was just thinking of leaving, to be honest. Are you fit to come with me?"
"Yeah… sure," Bates said, haltingly. "But you… You were…"
He gestured at the floor. It had been clean for barely more than a few hours.
"Yeah, sorry about that," Myles said, scratching his head somewhat awkwardly. "I was having a bad day."
"Bad day? Major – that was like…" he glanced at the clock on the wall behind him. "Six hours ago!"
"Six hours?" the giant repeated incredulously.
"Uh, yeah," Bates said, eyeing him as though he was a ghost.
"Jesus…" Myles murmured to himself. "It's an actual Christmas miracle."
"What?"
"I don't know," said the Fowl bodyguard. "I don't know what's going on here, but unless this is another hallucination, it's something really weird. Either way, I'm running with it. Are you coming?"
"Well yeah, of course I'll come with you," Bates said, grabbing the top blanket from the bed and stuffing his feet into some hospital-issue slippers. "And this isn't a hallucination. Unless I'm having one too."
"Well of course you'd say that," The Major frowned. "You'd say that even if you were imaginary."
"Put this 'round you," Bates said, tossing him the blanket and looking thoroughly perturbed as he eyed the semi-healed scars spattered all over the larger bodyguard's chest. "You look like a busted voodoo doll and you don't want to get imaginary frostbite when we get outside."
They made quite an interesting pair, stalking pre-dawn through the corridors of the hospital.
"So what's the plan?" Bates asked, once they were some distance from the ward they had set out from.
The Major was silent for a few seconds. Long enough that the Simmons' guard began to think his companion didn't actually have a plan at all.
"I have a lift for us. It's just a case of working out where she'll most likely be."
"You don't have a rendezvous site?"
"I was a bit preoccupied with basic survival functions to ask when we last met," The Major said, a little tetchily.
"Alright, alright," the younger guard said, holding up his hands. "I'm not being ungrateful, I'm just asking. Anything I can do to help?"
"Look as friendly as possible so that you don't get shot when we find her, if you can manage that."
"Great," said Will, trying to work out whether the man was joking or not.
He wasn't.
They weren't stopped as they exited into an alley behind the hospital, though Bates paused at the doorway. Snow was swirling, concealing the ugliness of the rubbish bins under its pristine flakes.
"What?" Myles paused, already on high-alert for anything that might pose a threat to either them or their escape attempt.
"You haven't even got any shoes on," Will pointed out. "Neither of us are armed, we're both dressed in pyjamas and it's probably about max minus five. We'll be missed as soon as the shift handover is complete and then what?"
"We'll be long gone by then," The Major said confidently, stepping onto the freshly-fallen snow as though it was a warm, plush carpet under his bare feet. "And besides – I'm always armed."
He made a disturbingly – or so Bates thought – out-of-character attempt at a 'jazz hands' gesture.
"Has anyone ever mentioned to you that you're insane?"
The Major laughed to himself. He liked this guy.
"Yeah? Well you're the one following me," said the Fowl bodyguard. "So I'd take a look at my own sanity if I were you."
Bates laughed to himself. He liked this guy.
"Touché," he said, pressing his hand to his chest and striding out after him.
Which was almost the last thing he ever did.
"Shit!" he yelped, as something deadly pinged off the metal dumpsters.
"Woah, woah, woah!" Myles barked rapidly, spinning back and grabbing Bates by the shoulder, standing squarely in front of him. "Stop! Stop it – he's with me!"
The alley remained still but for their elevated breathing, both bodyguards scanning the area rapidly. The Major kept his hand solidly on Bates' shoulder.
"It's OK," he said, slowly and clearly. "He's a friend."
Silence reigned for another few seconds and then, seemingly materialising in the gloom, a figure stepped forward.
"Since when do you make a habit of making friends?"
Myles breathed out quietly in relief, letting go of Will's shoulder and stepping forward.
"Since people started taking bullets for me," he asserted. "I owe him."
Bates made as though to speak, to explain that in all actuality he had merely taken a bullet – it would not have hit The Major otherwise and really, the debt had already been repaid by saving his life back in the theatre. The words were on the tip of his tongue, but his new 'friend' shut him up with a glare.
The woman looked at him critically.
"Can he run?"
"Yes," Myles answered for him.
"If he can keep up, you can bring him along," she sighed. "But I am not dilly-dallying for his sake."
Bates wasn't very sure he could run, actually, but he kept his mouth shut in favour of not getting shot. He also didn't mention he wasn't keen on being treated as though he was some stray animal a child was asking his parents to keep hold of.
The stranger holstered her gun and set off at a swift march.
"Come on. The vehicle's this way," she said by way of explanation. She didn't look back. "Hurry up!"
The bodyguards looked at eachother.
"Best go. Yes - she's always like this," said Myles with a sigh.
"Just a shot in the dark here," Bates said, trying to keep his breathing even in the icy air as they slogged after the woman. "But is she... a relative of yours?"
"However did you guess" Myles drawled.
Hope you're all enjoying this week where nobody knows what day it is or what they're supposed to be doing other than eating and sleeping off whatever they ate haha
Wolfy
ooo
O
28/09/2018